Washington seminar scrutinizes reduction in Brazilian inequality

Researchers gathered to discuss how demographic and territorial disparities as well as inequality in gender, race, the labor market, access to education and political participation have changed in the last 50 years.

By José Tadeu Arantes  |  Agência FAPESP – “No other country has data of this quality to document such a full history of economic development,” said Professor David Lam, Director of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan in the United States, in his comments on the book Trajetórias das Desigualdades: como o Brasil mudou nos últimos 50 anos.

Lam was one of the discussants in the seminar “Trajectories of Inequality in Brazil”, held on February 16 at the Brazil Institute, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC, to discuss the book, which was published in 2015.

Edited by Marta Arretche, Full Professor in the Political Science Department of the University of São Paulo (USP) and Director of the Center for Metropolitan Studies (CEM), one of the 17 Research, Innovation and Dissemination Centers (RIDCs) supported by FAPESP, the book presents a comprehensive portrait of the changes that Brazilians have experienced in the past 50 years, addressing inequalities of all kinds, from demographic and territorial disparities to gaps or imbalances in gender, race, the labor market, access to education and other services, and political participation.

“There has always been a lot of interest in the subject and plenty of available data, but there has never been a comprehensive long-term study of inequality as a multidimensional phenomenon,” Arretche said during the seminar’s opening session. Some of the researchers who contributed chapters to the book presented their key findings at the seminar, which was also attended by US academics and other guests.

Perhaps the event that most eloquently expresses the transition that Brazil has experienced in the past 50 years is its transformation from a rural nation to an urban one.

In total, 60% of the population lived in the countryside in 1960. A census conducted a decade later, in 1970, showed a sharp fall, to 40%. The proportion continued to decrease, albeit more slowly, reaching 30% in 1980, 20% in 1991, 15% in 2000, and 12% in 2010. The urban population grew more than fivefold in the same period, rising from 31.3 million in 1960 to 161 million in 2010.

Alongside urbanization, coverage by essential public services expanded continuously. Access to electricity and garbage collection has become practically universal, and more than 90% of the population now has tap water.

Sewers have not kept up, possibly because they cost more and are relatively complex to implement in engineering terms. Nevertheless, the prevalence has risen steadily, and just over 60% of the population lived in homes connected to municipal sewerage systems in 2010.

In education, with all due reservations regarding quality and the longer time taken to complete the various levels of schooling, considerable progress was achieved in the same period: whereas in 1960, only 30% of young people completed primary school (eight years) and less than 10% completed secondary school (four years), by 2010, the proportions had reached more than 90% and over 75%, respectively. Higher education lagged far behind, with only about 20% going to university or college and under 10% earning degrees.

All the same, gender inequality has been eliminated in higher education: indeed, there are now more female than male undergraduates overall, and many more women are now admitted into the universities that are considered leaders in prestige and in degrees with the best career opportunities.

Racial inequality remains an open sore: 75% of the university population was white in 2010, with non-whites mostly studying at less sought-after colleges.

Political participation

Regional inequality also remains acute, although it has decreased. The presentation by Eduardo Marques, a professor in USP’s Political Science Department and Deputy Director of CEM, showed not only that low-quality services are delivered to the poor, owing to regional inequality, but also that middle- and upper-income groups are less well serviced in cities of the North and Northeast than in those of the Southeast and South.

Marques cross-tabulated income data using 21 variables indicating urban conditions. He divided the overall population into four groups based on the results of this exercise.

His ranking of metropolitan areas was as follows, from worst to best in terms of infrastructure and service quality: Group 1, poor households in Belém, Fortaleza e Recife, and middle-income households in Belém; Group 2, poor households in Salvador, Belo Horizonte, Rio de Janeiro and Porto Alegre; middle-income households in Fortaleza, Recife and Salvador; and upper-income households in Belém; Group 3, poor households in São Paulo and Curitiba; middle-income households in Curitiba and Porto Alegre; and upper-income households in Fortaleza and Recife; and Group 4, middle-income households in Belo Horizonte, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo and upper-income households in Salvador, Belo Horizonte, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Curitiba and Porto Alegre.

José Antonio Cheibub, a professor in the Political Science Department of the University of Illinois, contributed a presentation on political participation via elections. There was relatively little participation in the period 1945-1964, when the rules governing voter registration functioned as a mechanism of exclusion. Voting rights have become universal, however, since the end of the military dictatorship, and especially since the new Constitution was passed in 1988. The introduction of electronic ballot boxes in the 1990s allowed inclusion of the poorest members of the population and those with the least schooling in the formal democratic election process.

A question underlying the discussions throughout the seminar and explicitly formulated by journalist Carlos Eduardo Lins da Silva, a Global Fellow of the Brazil Institute and a special advisor to FAPESP, is whether the reduction in inequality seen during the period and the social progress mapped by the book will withstand the present economic deterioration in Brazil, and especially the recession and adversities in several areas.

Arretche admitted that the book was planned and produced at a time of euphoria in Brazil, due mostly to the rapid pace of GDP growth, and that this may explain the predominantly optimistic tone. However, she argued, although the optimism may appear somewhat exaggerated, the book could be equally mistaken to exaggerate in the opposite direction.

The resilience of the changes detected by the researchers cannot be accurately gauged unless their causes are properly understood. In her closing remarks during the seminar, Arretche underscored the role of redemocratization in closing the inequality gaps, and especially the emphasis on civil and human rights in the 1988 Constitution.

She also partly questioned the well-known thesis formulated by French economist Thomas Piketty in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century: that capitalism intrinsically leads to ever-greater wealth concentration. Agreeing with Piketty, she acknowledged that the chasm between the richest 1% and the other 99% tends to be widened by the dynamics of the capitalist economy but argued that this does not prevent better distribution of income and property among the less well off.

Responding to Arretche’s remarks, sociologist and political scientist Maria Herminia Tavares de Almeida, affiliated with the think tank CEBRAP and invited to participate in the seminar as a discussant, said that recognition of the real importance of redemocratization should not exclude the appreciation of other variables. An analysis of the global arena, she went on, shows that emerging countries with very different political histories in recent decades have also seen a reduction in inequality and an overall improvement in social conditions.

David Lam mentioned other factors such as falling fertility rates, particularly due to their contribution to progress in education; the commodity boom; and favorable economic conditions in Brazil in the last decade of the period investigated.

More information on the Washington seminar can be found at www.wilsoncenter.org/event/trajectories-inequality-brazil. To watch a seminar held in Brazil with the main contributors, go to www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxI8Can9yAHeOH2lwlGLj0uQuE9TvnWzJ.